Multiple polls show Romney leading by double digits. He has the support of two of the state’s key lawmakers, Governor Jan Brewer and his 2008 nemesis Senator John McCain. The state’s significant Mormon demographic is expected to vote heavily for Romney. The race is pretty much a foregone conclusion. One key element in Romney’s favor here: despite the Republican National Committee’s call for states voting before April to allocate their delegates proportionately, all of the Arizona Republican Party’s delegates will go to the winner. This will allow Romney to continue building on his delegate lead and be a much-needed shot in the arm, especially if he loses Michigan.

Prediction: Romney by 15-20.

MichiganDelegates at Stake: 30
Allocation: Proportional by congressional district

Also worth considering is Michigan’s system of allocating delegates. 28 out of 30 delegates are allocated on the basis of who wins each of the state’s 14 congressional districts. The remaining two are divided by the proportion of the statewide popular vote. It is conceivable that one candidate could win the popular vote but lose the delegate count – the Bush v. Gore scenario. The Daily Beast points out one demographic strong and unique to Michigan: Muslim Americans in the Dearborn area. Will be interesting to see what – if any – impact they have in the Republican primary or if they are surveyed in exit polls.

The transfiguration of the GOP isn’t only about ideology, however. It is also about demography and temperament, as the party has grown whiter, less well schooled, more blue-collar, and more hair-curlingly populist. The result has been a party divided along the lines of culture and class: Establishment versus grassroots, secular versus religious, upscale versus downscale, highfalutin versus hoi polloi. And with those divisions have arisen the competing electoral coalitions—shirts versus skins, regulars versus red-hots—represented by Romney and Santorum, which are now increasingly likely to duke it out all spring.

Few Republicans greet that prospect sanguinely, though some argue that it will do little to hamper the party’s capacity to defeat Obama in the fall. “It’s reminiscent of the contest between Obama and Clinton,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently opined. “[That] didn’t seem to have done [Democrats] any harm in the general election, and I don’t think this contest is going to do us any harm, either.”

Yet the Democratic tussle in 2008, which featured two undisputed heavyweights with few ideological discrepancies between them, may be an exception that proves the rule. Certainly Republican history suggests as much: Think of 1964 and the scrap between the forces aligned with Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, or 1976, between backers of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. On both occasions, the result was identical: a party disunited, a nominee debilitated, a general election down the crapper.

With such precedents in mind, many Republicans are already looking past 2012. If either Romney or Santorum gains the nomination and then falls before Obama, flubbing an election that just months ago seemed eminently winnable, it will unleash a GOP apocalypse on November 7—followed by an epic struggle between the regulars and red-hots to refashion the party. And make no mistake: A loss is what the GOP’s political class now expects. “Six months before this thing got going, every Republican I know was saying, ‘We’re gonna win, we’re gonna beat Obama,’ ” says former Reagan strategist Ed Rollins. “Now even those who’ve endorsed Romney say, ‘My God, what a fucking mess.’ ”

One thing McConnell doesn’t mention in his quote that differentiates the 2008 Democratic Primaries from the 2012 Republican Primaries: the Democrats liked and were enthusiastic about both their candidates.

The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats.

The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. And the trends were even more striking in some key swing states. Judis and Teixeira highlighted Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile grounds for the expanding Democratic base.

Both are well worth reading and keeping in mind as the Republican primary process plays itself out in the months ahead.

9:29p – Paul at the podium. He’s live from campaign HQ in Henderson, Nevada tonight.
“If enthusiasm wins elections, we’d win, hands down.”
Paul congratulated Romney for winning Florida, says he’d see him in the caucus states.
“If you have an irate and tireless minority, you do well in caucus states.”
“Don’t you think it’s about time we had a new monetary policy?” Crowd goes nuts, starts cheering “End the Fed!”
“We need to reverse trend of attack on our civil liberties. We need to repeal the PATRIOT Act. We need to repeal provision that allows President to assassinate American citizens without trial.”